TheMall aims to have 100 floors and 100M square feet in the metaverse
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The advantage of virtual malls is that they won’t run out of space. A case in point is TheMall, which will debut later this year and will eventually have 100 floors and 100 million square feet of space.
Alan Smithson’s MetaVRse company has been working on TheMall for seven years. In an interview with GamesBeat, Smithson said he expects to launch the mall in the fourth quarter of 2022. It will be accessible on the web with no need for a download or an app or a special hardware platform. And it will use blockchain technology.
Smithson started working on the company with Julie Smithson in 2015 and incorporated the company in the spring of 2016. They assembled a team including Paul Konieczny, CEO; Walid Abdelaty, chief technology officer; and Stefanie Smith (formerly Ikea), president of marketing. They built an engine to run the mall on the web in 2020 and kept working on it, producing a second engine for this year’s launch with better graphics.
“Our goal is to be the No. 1 retail and entertainment destination in the metaverse and we believe that by starting with the familiar we can bring people that are not crypto natives,” Smithson said. “We were not focused on the crypto bro culture at all. We want to bring in just everyday people into this and it starts with video gamers and then goes out from there.”
I saw a demo of it and the images look pretty crisp. I logged in via the web on my laptop and it worked fine.
A demo of a motorcycle in a store had some interactive parts that moved. But you can still see the tradeoff of focusing on web content versus taking advantage of advanced game engines and special hardware
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